Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Been on the learning space the other day looking through it , seeing that we had to hand in stuff for the experimental animation project on there for some reason even though we sent it on disk and blogged stuff about it. Also what the hell is this other project about i think its the 11 second one but under another name for some reason which i had no idea about :S

Monday, 7 December 2009

The third assignment was to show a change in mood of a character/s , I completely missed the point of this which after andy and georg spoke to me about it , I had missed the anticipation and the reason to why the character reacts the way he does.

I had a few ideas for this which I think would of worked alot better than my final one , dont know why I didn't go with them to be fair.

Other Ideas

A bird crapping on a guys headA man at the bus stop getting splashed by a puddleA guy working at a computer when it crashes

All which were better than my final one which was a little guy listening to music then the big guy hits him in the face because he is getting annoyed with the loud music.

I showed the little character shaking as if to be scared and slying away from the big guy when he's not looking at him.

As I said before i'm not happy with the outcome of this project and I think I will do this again at some point.

For the second assignment I had to show a character lifting weight and showing that this object was heavy when I first thought about this I thought hmm can't be that hard , but then when playing around with things I find out that it is hard to show that something is heavy , you have to think about the timing and posture alot. I again refrenced to looking at the Animators suvival kit book which I got the basic idea and principles from.

I started out by drawing my pose to pose pictures and adding inbetweens on paper then I put them into the computer and went over the lines in Adobe Illustrator and then went over them again in Adobe Photoshop for the effect I wanted.

To show that the bowling ball was heavy I put in alot of ''shakes'' so you could see that the character was struggling with it , and also made him raise it up very slowly , at the end he drops it slightly then has to really push it up above his head.

At the start of the animation I made the character scratch his head as to be thinking about what way to approach the ball , I made the begining part very fast when he is trying to lift it up as I really wanted to show the enitial lift.

Overall I am very happy with this because I think you really get the idea and sense that the bowling ball is really heavy and that the character is struggling alot.

For our first assignment we had to make a simple walk cycle , for this I looked at Richard Williams Animators guide alot for how it should look and feel. I thought it turned out good I like how the character has a nice bounce to his step , the only thing I would change is so the character keeps in proportion as his hands change size etc.

Tuesday, 1 December 2009

For the experimental project we had to listen to 4 pieces of sound : -

1. '' Black_Angels-2 '' - was a very high pitched freaky sound with some german vocals2. '' Lorraine-A '' - This was a melow jazz piece3. '' Mally-A '' - Violin very classical relaxing piece4. '' Ruta Daita '' - This had a nice drum beat and sounded very tribal

After listening to all these I was temptin to go for the violin piece of music as I do like classical but I thought I could do more with the '' Ruta Daita '' piece as it had a nice beat to it.

For this experimental project we were shown some videos from the 50's by these two men of which names I cannot remember as I have lost my notes from the lectures and painting of cells and scatching them etc to create a differeent image. We were show '' Binky & Boo '' which is a cut out animation which I really liked the style of how it was done and I also found it pretty funny.

The main objective for this project was how sound works with image , we had to choose one method for our animation in which I choose to do cut out. Before I started to animate I had to break down the sound so I could match sound with image , for this I used '' Adobe Soundbooth '' the sound piece is 38 seconds long and I think it took me around 6 hours to break it all down in the end.

Rough Dope Sheets.

This project is really irritating me i've made two 20 second cut out projects so far , both of which I think are absoloute rubbish. One of them was in the test stage and the other is still test but not as rough. I cant seem to think of anything that I'm happy with at the moment.

The first one was foot prints going in time with the drum beats , then grass pulling back to reveal two antelope drinking water followed by a panther behind grass which eventually runs out to attack and kill one .. . sounds like a good idea but it didn't work to well I might re-start again and see what happens.

This is a rough layout from my very first idea.

The second one I kept the foot prints from the first but had flowers stems growing then buds then petals falling off is where I have got to so far. Another idea I had was tribes people mayan's , native's hunting down animal's then having a camp fire but after seeing another person had done this I opted agasint it.

Right I realised i've deleted one of them because it was that bad but here is the other one I started.

One of the first one's I started.

When I finally got my final idea in the works time was short and I had used alot of it managing other projects and personal issues , I liked the footprints at the start of the animation when I looked at it so as the music is very tribal I thought why not have a panther running through the jungle/desert etc , I cut out different bits of grass,hills and plants.

For the panther running I cut out four different shapes and put it into Adobe Flash and had the run cycle on a loop so I put it on a layer above the backgrounds I was cutting out. The backgrounds I cut out were different times of day , at the end of the animation the panther runs into shot and and sits up then the the letters '' RUTA DAITA '' appear in different colours aswell as my name.

When watching it back i'm still not entierly happy and watching it back there is so much more I could have done if i organised my time better and had a more clearer idea from the start instead of wasting time by doing others, for instance when the panther is running through the backgrounds there could be alot going on there within the sky and other animals aswell.